6 tips for profitable medical practice management

How the right practice management system can help you successfully navigate reimbursements and optimize financial performance

Managing a practice means navigating a daily labyrinth of demands, disruptions, and decisions.

Challenges like finding and hiring qualified medical staff, navigating the moving target of healthcare regulations, investigating and incorporating viable value-based care (VBC) programs, and battling burnout are all common obstacles for practice managers and healthcare administrators — and that’s just the beginning. Research shows that the operational costs of running a medical practice have been steadily increasing, including the cost of medical supplies, labor, utilities, and more.¹

To maximize revenue, practices must manage their medical billing process more efficiently without sacrificing accuracy. To put it simply, they need to operate at peak performance. Whether you manage a small medical practice or are the practice manager of a larger healthcare organization, these challenges likely sound familiar. Rest assured that help lies with your practice management software—or it should.

Not sure if your practice management system is doing the work to help you succeed? Here are 6 ways to help increase financial performance and optimize cash flow.

1. Automate routine revenue cycle management processes and tasks to free up time

According to our 2025 Physician Sentiment Survey, less than half (42%) of physicians feel that their healthcare organization is on solid financial footing, leaving the majority feeling that their practice’s financial performance is at risk.²

The good news is, there are a number of stages of the healthcare revenue cycle that can be streamlined to help relieve administrative burden on your billing staff.

Whenever possible, leverage tools like automation so these revenue cycle management (RCM) tasks can run in the background while you focus on more complex job functions. So, what does this look like in practice?

Much of the administrative work around medical billing can be done automatically. Things like insurance eligibility and verification, submitting medical claims (when claims are reviewed and approved by appropriate clinicians), sending patient statements, and financial reporting can all be automated to ultimately add up to a more efficient and finely tuned revenue cycle process. This allows practice staff to focus more of their time on patient care and volume.

The right system can help you track revenue and payments, reduce administrative billing and claims tasks, and increase patient volume.

2. Minimize no-shows and missed appointments to help maximize billable time

According to Becker’s Hospital Review, the average no-show or missed appointment can cost a medical practice about $200.³ When a patient doesn’t make it in for their scheduled appointment, your practice risks losing revenue and valuable time that could have been spent caring for other patients.

To help prevent no-shows, your practice can implement any of these helpful strategies:

• Automated appointment reminders: Sending automated reminders via text, email, or through the patient portal can help patients remember their appointments. These reminders can be scheduled a few days before and on the day of the appointment.
• Online, flexible scheduling: Allowing patients to book, reschedule, or cancel appointments online can help reduce barriers and make it more convenient for them.
• Follow-Up Calls: For patients who frequently miss appointments, a follow-up call from staff can help address any concerns or barriers they may have regarding attendance.

3. Pre-process patients before care is given to help ensure proper reimbursement for appointments

Prior authorization challenges and inaccurate insurance information can often lead to delays in care, treatment abandonment, and poor patient outcomes. To set yourself up for success with reimbursements, it’s vital to verify that your patients are covered before care is given.

Insurance verification tools, as well as automated prior authorizations for certain tests and procedures, can help relieve some of the burden associated with verifying patients are fully covered and approved before they arrive for their scheduled appointment. When patients arrive, make sure they’ve also filled out any necessary intake forms and pre-visit questionnaires with their insurance information, secondary insurance, and primary payment method.

4. Track patient balances to help prevent revenue from walking out the door

Besides reimbursements, patient balances also add up to a significant percentage of a practice’s income, making them a critical part of financial performance. To help reduce outstanding balances, improve cash flow, and decrease administrative costs to collect, patient and self-pay balances should be managed as part of your practice’s daily revenue cycle workflow.

Use these strategies to help ensure efficient patient collections are integrated across your revenue cycle:

• Collect at time of care: Collecting payments early in a patient visit is critical. Keep a credit card on file for each patient to help eliminate the need to chase these payments down later.
• Set clear financial expectations: Clearly communicate to patients about their copays, deductibles, and any outstanding balances before their visit.
• Empower staff to collect: Identify staff who are more experienced in asking for payments and position them to handle critical points in the revenue cycle.
• Follow up on outstanding patient balances: Making sure you’re not leaving revenue on the table also means keeping track of which patient visits have been paid for, and which haven’t. Swift and efficient follow-up on unpaid balances helps your practice get paid and reduces the likelihood of accruing bad debt.

5. Bill appointments immediately after patient visits for better accuracy and quicker claims submission

As many practice managers know, reimbursement delays can be detrimental to an efficient and profitable revenue cycle. The longer your charge lag, the more you risk not getting paid for care and services provided to patients. Prompt medical billing helps ensure your practice receives payments more quickly and maintains a healthy cash flow. By billing immediately after care is given, your practice can help minimize A/R Days, or the time that claims sit in accounts receivable. Submitting a bill right after the patient’s appointment can also lead to better billing accuracy in capturing the services provided, since details of the visit are fresh in the minds of both the provider and the billing staff.

Finally, prompt billing can help facilitate quicker claim submissions to payers, leading to faster processing times and reimbursements. All of these process improvements combined can have a positive effect on not only your speed to bill, but overall financial performance.

6. Track, benchmark, and measure key performance metrics to get an accurate picture of financial health

A successful practice relies on critical data to help track performance and practice growth. Having the right metrics at their disposal can help practices better analyze and understand their overall financial health and also tackle longer-term revenue challenges that may persist year over year.

Many practices leverage RCM tools from their healthcare IT system to help track fiscal growth and optimize financial performance over time. These RCM tools enable practices to get a closer look at data like total number of visits, costs to collect, charge capture, charge lag, patient collections and patient pay yield, as well as view revenue trends over time. Some even help you measure critical payer metrics like denial rate, days in accounts receivable, and clean claims rate.

Your practice’s bottom line becomes much clearer when you have the data at your fingertips. Tools and features that enable you to monitor RCM data and set financial benchmarks will help your practice proactively track billing and practice management challenges before they become a larger issue.

How athenaOne® can help drive better practice management

athenaOne is a comprehensive, all-in-one solution for medical practices, featuring core capabilities around physician practice management and medical billing, electronic health records (EHR), and patient engagement. Here are just a few of the ways that athenaOne can help practice managers.

1. Drive patient volume while decreasing no-shows: athenaOne can help your practice send automated reminders via text and email and through the patient portal, so patients always have a clear view of upcoming appointments. The patient portal also makes it easy for patients to shift and reschedule appointments on their own time, saving you time and energy and helping reduce the risk of cancellations and no-shows.
2. Cut down on pre-visit administrative tasks and ensure appropriate reimbursement: athenaOne can help your practice with AI-powered insurance selection and expert authorization management services, saving significant time on these administrative tasks for high-volume practices, decreasing charge entry lag, and increasing your ability to provide more billable procedures by having more time to treat patients.
3. Track critical revenue metrics to stay on top of cash flow: using tools like athenaOne can help your practice identify baseline RCM metrics like A/R Days, Patient Pay Yield (PPY), and Cost to Collect. Keeping an eye on these important benchmarks can help your practice set realistic revenue goals and stay on track financially.

Ready to learn more? Discover how Mountain View Medical Center transformed their operational efficiency and reduced administrative burden on staff using athenaOne for practice management.